Electric mountain board with glove control

Last summer, we saw [Andres Guzman]’s electric mountain board tearing around the University of Illinois campus. He’s back again, only this time the board isn’t controlled with a PlayStation controller. [Andres] built a wireless glove to control his mountain board.

An Arduino and power supply is mounted to the glove. A 2.4GHz transceiver serves as the comm link between the glove and board. The speed control is handled by this flex sensor from Sparkfun. With the flex sensor held between the middle and ring fingers, all [Andres] needs to do to apply power is slightly bend his fingers.

There’s also a number of safety features built into the board. To enable power to the boards motor, there’s a dead man switch on the glove underneath the thumb. If [Andres] were to take a nasty spill, he would release the switch and the board would come to a stop. [Andres] also made sure the board would shut down if the wireless link was interrupted. The build seems pretty safe, even if he is tearing around his campus in the video below.

18 thoughts on “Electric mountain board with glove control”

I like your PS/2-controlled version, but that takes two hands. Just as I was wondering if you were going to stay on the sidewalk, you took it off into the grass. [ + ]
You do good work. It’s OK to over-spec (motors, micros, etc.) When you go to production then dialing back to the minimum required makes sense, but when you’re getting things done – hey, you’re getting things done.

I saw this at “adafruit”, it’s apropos:
“When you make a thing, a thing that is new, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly. But those that make it after you, they don’t have to worry about making it. And they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when others make it after you” — Pablo Picasso

Wearing a helmet is catch 22 (almost) as if you dont wear a helmet your head doesnt heat up, and you have 80% less chance of having accidents, then you wear a helmet your head warms up making you more likely to make a mistake but wearing the helmet helps with regard to head injuries. I never wear a helmet inline skating and I go faster then he does.

Kill switch “is designed to completely abort the operation at all costs, and be configured so that it is quick to operate, and relatively obvious to someone other than the usual operator.” Your kill-switch is the 60A breaker that connects the battery to everything else.

Dead-man switch “is a switch that is automatically operated in case the human operator becomes incapacitated, such as through death or loss of consciousness.” Your hand-mounted button is the dead-man switch.